Walkaway

Published July 8, 2018 by Head of Zeus.

ISBN:
978-1-78669-307-5
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4 stars (80 reviews)

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza―known to his friends as Hubert, Etc―was too old to be at that Communist party.

But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be―except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society―and walk away.

After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life―food, clothing, shelter―from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system.

It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by …

9 editions

Treat yourself to a great extrapolation loaded with political implications

5 stars

Very enjoyable book, interesting extrapolation of ideas (wikis, fabrication, human uploading, end of scarcity, etc) mixed with a clear political (anticapital) message. One of the most mature and exhilarating books by Cory. I have been relistening the book amidst the great Twitter migration and it gained a whole new additional meaning!

A vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, cyanogenmod-installing, cypherpunk githubbers everywhere

5 stars

Walkaway by @pluralistic@mamot.fr has been described as a utopian novel in a sea of dystopian alternatives, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian. It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from mundane technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printer 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual …

Review of 'Walkaway: A Novel' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Reading this at the same time as Homo Deus by Yuval Harari puts an odd spin on the story, like binary stars in an eccentric orbit. Is it a techno-liberal fantasy, or a dataist rebellion? Maybe just let it provoke its own ideas and enjoy a ride with some different flavors of light and darkness. For someone who has walked away once or twice, it has a special appeal.

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I confess I have a soft spot for Cory Doctorow's writing. This book is a brilliant novel, which portrays a plausible future. Walkaways are a different approach to society, based on collaboration, self organisation and freedom. They leave our society, referred to as "default" and live on the fringes of it. They make good use of what we consider waste, they adapt, implement and simply walk away, sort of like nomads, when things get dangerous or when they simply need to.
There's a lot of interesting concepts that are intertwined in this novel, anarchism, 3d printing, resilient networking, immortality through technology, social inequality, pacifism, LGBTQ love, just to name a few.
I will return to it in the future, and will be reccomending it to friends.

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I've re read this book and enjoyed it a lot more than the first time. This time around the story seems more coherent …

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I read Walkaway a year ago but it keeps coming back to my mind. A utopia inside a dystopia. Hard sci-fi read with major anti-sexism and LGBT-friendly plot points. Awesome characters in a post-scarcity world where everything can be 3d-printed. Ends in revolutionary high tech style <3

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Another great Doctorow novel, filled with intense sociological discussions and explosions. I don't know too many novels that have to acknowledge the work of Thomas Piketty as a source. Truly a great ride through a potential post-human post-scarcity transition period. You just know the powers that be won't let that sort of thing happen quietly.

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'LibraryThing'

No rating

For some reason, I’ve read a number of novels recently set in the near future, working through the implications of environmental catastrophe, economic inequality, technological advances. I’m growing impatient with many of them because they assume people, in a pinch, will turn on each other, that those who aren’t predators risk being prey. Once the threat of fill in the blank comes to pass, we’ll not only lose everything, we’ll be at each others’ throats. This novel is a utopian fork of dystopia by someone who loves technology but doesn’t love the way intellectual property regimes restrict its use. Though I didn’t find it entirely successful as a novel (the prose is . . . prosaic, the technology seems suspiciously failure-proof, and the characters won’t stop talking), it poses an interesting thought experiment: what if, in a world of abundance unevenly distributed, people simply walked away from our market-based assumptions …

Review of 'Walkaway: A Novel' on Goodreads

4 stars

Enjoyable thriller from a premise of transitioning to post-scarcity, as another reviewer put it this is as much a philosophical dialog on the assumptions of capitalism as it is a novel. Love the acknowledgements at the end crediting inspiration from Solnit's A Paradise Built In Hell, Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century.

Review of 'Walkaway' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Three stars for plot and characters, four stars for interesting ideas, would give this 3.5 stars if I could. Doctorow is a futurist; a tech fan; a forward thinker. His novels tend to explore slightly futuristic dystopias, extrapolating elements of the current direction of technology into a future extreme, and this does the same. It's structured as a novel but I think it's as much an exploration of "what if" that he's working out as he's writing. What if in the future we reach a post-scarcity world where technology (3d printers and such) can provide enough for ALL humans to live in comfort? But of course, those at the top, the "zottarich" (zotta being a bigger number than mega) feel entitled to their far bigger share of the wealth than those beneath them, so the usual problems of homelessness and starvation continue to exist. The gap between the haves and …

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